Torture was also the norm when the unfortunates were already
serving their jail sentences. According to Mateusz Wyrwich,
it still has not been established how many thousands of prisoners,
out of 500,000 people who were incarcerated by the Communists
between 1944 and 1956, perished because of torture and other
forms of maltreatment.[32] For
example, over 800 witnesses have appeared to testify about
torture in the Wronki prison, where, between 1945 and 1956,
about 15,500 people were incarcerated, mostly political prisoners.
Victims were routinely made to strip and wait in the prison
yard, winter time included. Then, they were chased between
two rows of wardens who beat them with truncheons and keys.
The functionaries most responsible for the torture were the
prison head Jan Boguwola, and his underlings: Adam Serwata,
Wiktor Urbaniak, Józef Mikołajczak, Marian Kraus,
Jerzy Białas, Marian Dusik, Tomasz Nowicki, and Jan Szymczak.[33]

Torture was an integral part of Poland’s totalitarian
reality. It was fully harmonized with the “legal” system
and reflected in the official propaganda.[34]

The Legal Basis of Torture and the Communist Propaganda

No law explicitly permitted torturing anyone under Communism.
However, between 1944 and 1956, the laws and regulations[35] commonly
applied against political offenders were utterly dehumanizing
and, hence, implicitly encouraged their abuse, including torture.
Two types of distinct legal systems functioned at the time:
the Soviet and the Polish. The former applied not only in Poland’s
eastern territories incorporated into the Soviet Union after
the return of the Red Army in 1944, but also to the west of
the so-called Curzon line, wherever the Soviet terror apparatus
(and judiciary) happened to operate. While at the mercy of
the NKVD, most commonly, the political offenders were charged
under the infamous Article 58 of the Soviet penal code. According
to Article 58, a Home Army soldier, who was ethnically Polish,
born in pre-war Poland, and a life-long citizen of Poland could
be sentenced as “traitor to the Soviet Motherland” in
addition to being a “counter-revolutionary,” “Hitlerite
collaborator,” and “fascist.”[36]

Simultaneously, although always deferring to the Soviet law,
the local Communists in Poland introduced their own legal regulations.
More precisely, they amended the existing pre-war laws with
a bevy of their own decrees. Arguably, the most important of
them was the infamous Decree of August 31, 1944, against “the
fascist-Hitlerite criminals and traitors of the Polish Nation.” The
decree was promulgated by the Communist proxy regime and used
mainly as a political and legal tool of repression against
the independentists fighters and politicians, who were routinely
branded as “Hitlerite collaborators,” “fascists,” and “reactionaries.”[37] The
August 31, 1944 Decree was also applied to real and alleged
Nazi collaborators, including for instance persons accused
of participating the massacre of Jews at Jedwabne, thus from
a legal point of view making it a political rather than a criminal
case.[38]

The language of the August Decree was extremely violent.
It reflected the language of contemporary Communist propaganda.
And the Communists dubbed as “fascists” and “reactionaries” anybody
who disagreed with them.[39] The
independentist insurgents were of course the primary targets
of the Stalinist vituperation. The guidelines for propaganda
of the Central Board of Political Formatting of the Polish
People’s Army aptly titled “Concerning the mobilization
of hatred toward the reactionary thugs” instructed the
political commissars to “brand with all your strength
the criminal activities of the bastards of the NSZ and AK,
Hitler’s emulators. Develop hatred among the soldiers
and push them against the reactionaries.”[40]

Accordingly, Communist military political commissars publicly
preached that during the Warsaw ghetto uprising the following
forces fought against the Jewish insurgents: “the German
air force, the SS, and tanks as well as Polish hooligans, Polish
reactionaries and, actually, the AK.”[41] Therefore, “the
criminals of the AK and NSZ work hand in glove with the Hitlerites.
And they should be treated just like the Hitlerite murderers.”[42] A
Communist pundit editorialized that “during the [Nazi]
occupation the NSZ formed an auxiliary formation of the SS
and Gestapo.”[43] “Put
on trial the AK and NSZ murderers, Hitler’s helpers!” screamed
the official posters in unison.[44]

As Professor Krystyna Kersten has noted perceptively, the
independentist insurgents and the parliamentary opposition
were the chief “reactionaries.” Significantly, “reactionary” was
synonymous with “bandit,” “traitor,” “fascist,” “Hitlerite,” “anti-Semite,” and “Jew-killer.” Whoever
killed Jews was not just a traitor, but also “an agent
of Hitler.” Anybody who opposed the Communists was also
a potential “Jew-killer,” or at least could be
accused of such terrible anti-Semitic deeds, and, hence, branded “a
Nazi collaborator.” This was a convenient propaganda
device commonly employed to dupe the West into believing that
the opponents of the Communists were pro-Nazi and that the
brutal crushing of the independentist insurrection and the
parliamentary opposition in Poland was simply a mop-up operation
which fittingly concluded the anti-German struggles of the
Second World War. This was also a useful tool to rally the
population behind the Communists in meting out justice to alleged
Polish “Hitlerites.”[45] (The
trick was further intended to endear the proxy regime to the
Jewish community at home and abroad.)[46]

Communist law was well-harmonized with the propaganda. It
seems that the intention of the authors of the August Decree
was to limit, if not outright preclude, the possibility of
a fair investigation and a fair trial. The objective was to
punish “Nazi collaborators,” whether real or alleged.
In other words, the Communist policemen, prosecutors, lawyers,
and judges involved in the cases pursued and tried on the basis
of the August Decree were not interested in recreating the
crimes, describing their details, identifying the victims,
and finding the perpetrators. They were out to destroy the
enemy: physically and morally. Numerous accounts of the victims
of the Communist investigative and legal process seem to signal
just that.

Case Studies: Ejszyszki and Jedwabne

Two separate case studies conducted by us strongly suggest
that both the investigation and the court proceedings widely
departed from the Western standards of justice. The most jarring
abuses included the lack of professional meticulousness and
the application of torture.

In the case of Ejszyszki, following the attack of the Home
Army (AK) on that town on October 19/20, 1944, the Soviet secret
police initially did not bother to collect any witness accounts.
The NKVD policemen simply beat confessions out of most of the
suspects. A few refused to give in; most confessed, gradually
yielding to their tormentors. The confessions, of course, included
killing Jews and collaborating with the Gestapo. Later, some
of the victims retracted their confessions in court. Nonetheless,
some were sentenced to death, while most were sent to the Gulag
on the basis of Article 58.[47] In
the case of Jedwabne, where a number of Polish inhabitants
were accused of assisting the Nazis in murdering the local
Jews, the police and the judiciary were concerned about establishing
neither the sequence of the events nor even the date of the
mass murder.[48] Using as
a blue-print the imprecise and internally contradictory testimony
of a second hand witness, they tortured the suspects into confessing
to killing Jews and collaborating with the Nazis. Later, the
accused were tried on the basis of the August 31, 1944, Decree.[49]

In both the Ejszyszki and the Jedwabne cases the secret police
seized a number of suspects, including completely innocent
people, who confessed under duress to their complicity in the
alleged crimes. On the other hand, at least a few prisoners
customarily denied their culpability and blamed their confederates,
in particular those who had been killed or were otherwise beyond
the reach of the secret police.[50]

The reality of the interrogation and the trial should not
obscure the fact that some of the suspects did take part in
the AK assault on Ejszyszki, while others did participate in
the massacre at Jedwabne. The gruesome ruthlessness of the
Communist secret police and the judiciary should give us cause
to pause however, before we treat the Communist interrogation
records at their face value. All documents should be checked
and cross-checked against other sources. Initially at least,
all accounts of torture should also be treated as raw data.

Raw Data

We have drawn our raw data on the topic of torture from the
following sources: historical monographs, personal testimonies,
legal records, and newspaper accounts. Legal records concern
both the original cases from the 1940s and 1950s as well as
contemporary cases generated by the investigative arm of the
Institute of National Remembrance. Polish newspapers, ranging
from the dynamic leftist Gazeta Wyborcza [Electoral
Gazette] through the most respected centrist daily Rzeczpospolita [Republic]
to the right-wing Catholic nationalist Nasz Dziennik [Our
Daily], routinely report on court cases regarding the trials
of both Communist secret police personnel and their political
opponents. Further, the popular press periodically runs investigative
historical stories on the anti-Communist insurgents and their
tormentors. In all sources, the topic of torture is broached
openly most of the time. The description is graphic and detailed.

From these accounts we learn that, aside from beating, the
secret policemen liked to tear the hair out of the victim’s
body, extinguish their cigarettes on him or her, and apply
many other methods of torture. Pathological behavior of this
sort was also prevalent in low profile cases. Arguably, secret
policemen serving in remote provincial outposts tended to be
even more cruel because they lacked immediate supervision.
But even if their sadism reflected itself just in beating and
not in sexual perversion, it still was the norm. There were
no boundaries to the cruelty and no consideration was given
to the status, sex, or health of the victim. In one instance
socialist Irena Sendlerowa of the Home Army miscarried after
she was abused by the UB.[51] In
another case, the UB-man Edmund Kwasek tortured Józefa
Gradecka of the AK who was pregnant.[52]

In our sample below we have documented more than 500 cases
of torture. Almost all victims described below were ethnic
Poles and Catholics, save for a single Jewish man. One hundred
and fifty four victims are identified by name, including 21
women. Most of the victims of torture, except for some of the
youngest ones, were involved in both the anti-Nazi and anti-Communist
struggle from 1939. The victims were subjected at least to
49 types of torture. Twelve prisoners were tortured to death,
while 8 were shot immediately after the torture sessions (usually
following a sham trial). Eight prisoners, including three women,
withstood the torture, refused to confess, and survived their
ordeal. In 143 (out of 154) cases the prisoners broke down
and confessed their real and alleged “crimes.” Hence,
our research strongly suggests that torture served its intended
purpose,[53] a few exceptions
notwithstanding.[54]

As for the perpetrators, although the Soviets led the way,[55] they
found many eager Polish collaborators. Although no thorough
search has been undertaken in the secret police personal files
nationwide, the evidence accumulated here suggests that most
of the functionaries of the Communist terror apparatus were
ethnic Poles of lower class origin. The witnesses mention but
a few Jewish Communist perpetrators.[56] At
times, the crimes were perpetrated jointly by the Soviets and
Poles. For example, between 1945 and 1955 in a military restricted
area of Biedrusk near Poznań, dozens of prisoners were
tortured and summarily shot by Soviet and Polish Communist
military intelligence officers. The executions took place in
a church. The victims were lined up behind the altar and executed.[57]

Of course not everyone was physically tortured. For example,
Major Zygmunt Szendzielarz (“Łupaszko”) of
the Wilno AK was only tormented psychologically.[58] However,
preliminary research suggests that his case was an exception.
His soldiers and other insurgents were tortured routinely.

We have discerned three types of situations under which torture
occurred: preliminary interrogation, interrogation proper,
and post-interrogation. First, while operating in the field,
the Communist secret police routinely tortured captured insurgents
and suspected sympathizers to extract information regarding
the whereabouts of their confederates and arms stores. Second,
during the interrogation proper, the secret police applied
torture to extract precise information about the insurgency,
political opposition, and war-time activities as well as to
force the victims to confess to trumped up charges, some of
which were also morally damaging (e.g. the routine but false
allegations about collaborating with the Nazi police and murdering
Jews and Soviets). Third, during the post-interrogation the
prisoners were sometimes tortured if they deviated from their
forced confession in court or just for the sake of it as they
were serving their sentences in jail. To put it plainly, whereas
at the initial stage of an investigation the UB officers concerned
themselves with finding out the truth, the desired outcome
of the intermediate stage was a full confession which freely
mixed truth with fiction.

The following examples, presented chronologically, concern
mostly the interrogation proper. However, in general, the evidence
presented below attests to the prevalence of torture at every
stage of one’s experience with the Communist secret police.

Case by Case.

Between September 1944 and 1945, about 3,000 prisoners were
incarcerated at a concentration camp run by the NKVD at Kąkolewica,
near Łuków in the Province of Lublin. According
to the estimates of the underground, up to 1,800 people were
shot following a grueling interrogation. Cadet officer Antoni
Sztolcman (“Mewa”) was one of the 16 local NSZ-AK
company soldiers seized between September 28 and October 6,
1944. He and his friends were beaten daily and held in a dugout
partly filled with water. Because he refused to turn in his
older brother, who was a Home Army fighter, the seventeen-year-old
Czesław Pękała was kicked on his head until
he fainted. His NKVD interrogators also shoved thin wooden
splinters under his fingernails.[59]

On October 30, 1944, Major Jakub Hałas (“Kuba”)
of the AK Lublin District Command fell into an NKVD trap. He
died of blood infection after the blows of the torturers shattered
his ribs and punctured his lungs on December 30, 1944. His
underling, Lieutenant Witold Engelking (“Prot”),
was captured on November 7, 1944, and beaten to death shortly
after.[60]

In the fall of 1944, AK soldier Irena Antoszewska-Rembarzowa
was interrogated by the NKVD in Lublin. Although pregnant,
she was ordered to strip and when she refused, her Soviet interrogator
beat her on her head until she fainted.[61]

In February 1940, Father Michał Pilipiec (“Michał”)
volunteered for the underground Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ),
and later the AK. First, he was a chaplain of the Błazowa
outpost and later he became the head chaplain for the Rzeszów
sub-district (obwód). Father Pilipiec continued his
underground activities under the Soviet occupation until he
was arrested by the NKVD and Polish Communist secret police
led by Zygmunt Bieszczanin on December 3, 1944. He was brutally
tortured at the Lubomirski Zamek prison in Rzeszów.
He shared his cell with AK soldiers Dominik Sobczyk, Stanisława
Rybka (“Szpak”), Józef Bator, and Jan Szela.
On December 7, Father Pilipiec was sentenced to death along
with his cellmates. The prisoners were shot the same day, except
for cadet officer Rybka who escaped from the place of the execution
and left the following account of torture:

The priest was unable to stand on his own. We helped him
to reach his straw mattress. Then we put him down on it.
He was terribly massacred. His cassock was torn in many places.
There were wounds all over his body. The skin on his head
was broken and a stream of blood dripped from it. He writhed
in pain. This must have been some incredible pain as the
priest was unable to refrain from crying and moaning.[62]

In March 1945 the Communist secret police boss of Radom, Jan
Byk aka Czesław Borecki, arrested the wife of AK-WiN Captain
Stefan Bembiński (“Harnaś”). To force
the woman to reveal the whereabouts of her husband and his
confederates, Byk “beat me with a flat of his hand on
my face, breaking my teeth.”[63]

On April 18, 1945, the NKVD and the UB seized a few soldiers
of the NZW’s Emergency Special Action (Pogotowie
Akcji Specjalnej – PAS ) in Lubaczów, including
Lieutenant Konstanty Kopf (“Zawisza”). After three
days in local jail, the prisoners were transferred to the UB
headquarters in Rzeszów. Tortured from April through
October 1945, Kopf recalled that:

The interrogation sessions lasted 24 hours. The UB interrogators
applied a variety of physical torture. That included hitting
the prisoner, suspending him tied from a bar, tearing off
his fingernails, beating him on the soles of his feet, applying
electric shocks during questioning, and putting him in solitary
confinement [karcer]. This was a closed cell two
meters by two with a large, round hole in the middle leading
to the septic tank down below which served as the main depository
for refuse from the whole jail. The prisoner could only stand
up in that cell and walk around that hole. The stench of
feces and ammonia caused one’s eyes to become infected.
Standing caused one’s legs to swell. If the prisoner
was not able to withstand that kind of torture, he would
fall into the hole and drawn. There were also instances of
the prisoner standing in that cell and they hosed him with
water. The present writer was sentenced to 102 hours of solitary
confinement.[64]

In December 1944 and August 1946, in Nisko, the UB officer
Stanisław Suproniuk arrested Lieutenant Skarbimir Socha
( “Jaskółka” ) of the NOW -AK-NZW.
First in Nisko and then in Rzeszów, “Suproniuk
beat me with a chain and his assistant Józef Orsa with
the butt of his submachine gun.”[65] In
April 1945 Suproniuk and his underlings arrested Janina Oleszkiewicz,
the wife of the NOW-AK-NZW insurgent Major Franciszek Przysiężniak
(“Ojciec Jan”). She was in an advanced stage of
pregnancy. Oleszkiewicz was interrogated overnight and then
taken out for a ride and summarily shot.[66] Other
UB-men suspected of crimes at the Security Office in Nisko,
include the Młynarskis, father and son.[67]

In August 1945 the secret police arrested Captain Kazimierz
Moczarski, who served in the Home Army during the Nazi occupation
and afterward in one of its clandestine successors, the Delegation
of the Armed Forces (Delegatura Sił Zbrojnych – DSZ).
Moczarski was also a liberal and a leader of the center-leftist
Democratic Party (Stronnictwo Demokratyczne – SD).
As Moczarski recalled, UB Colonel Józef Goldberg, aka
Jacek Różański, “told me that… I
would go through a ‘hellish interrogation’ – which
really happened later.” Różański threatened
the victim that he would receive the death penalty. He also
explained that “we can always prove that you were a Gestapo
agent because we have the blank originals of the official stationery
of the Gestapo, their rubber stamps, and the like. We also
are holding such former Gestapo members who will very gladly
sign a post-dated file prepared by us that you were a Gestapo
agent.” Although Moczarski was tortured horribly, he
refused to confess his “crimes” but was nonetheless
sentenced to death.

Subsequently, Moczarski enumerated forty-nine different types
of torture he was subjected to by eight officers of the UB
during the interrogation which lasted from November 30, 1948,
to September 22, 1952. The torture included beating with a
nightstick, a piece of wire, and a metal rod on Moczarski’s
throat, nose, fingers, and feet; tearing out his hair (from
his genitals, beard, head, and chest); burning him with cigarettes
and candles (on his lips, eyes, and fingers); crushing his
toes with jackboots; kicking his entire body; stabbing him
with needles; injuring his rectum with a screw and a stool
leg; forcing the prisoner to do sit-ups until he fainted; forcing
the prisoner to run up and down the stairs for long periods
of time; locking him naked in solitary confinement; depriving
him of sleep for up to 9 days at a stretch and preventing him
from falling asleep by periodically slapping his face; forcing
him to stand at attention for hours with his hands raised;
and depriving him of food and drink for days. Physical torture
was accompanied by psychological torment. It included depriving
Moczarski of any contact with his family; informing him alternately
that his wife “whom…[he] loved very much” was
either dead or cheating on him; writing on the forehead of
this famous anti-Nazi fighter the word “Gestapo”;
and, finally, locking him in a cell for almost a year with
Gestapo men, including SS-General Jürgen Stroop, the executioner
of the Warsaw ghetto. All these and other methods were employed
to force Moczarski to talk.[68]

In September 1945, the Communist secret police captured insurgent
liaison Barbara Nagajewicz- Woś (“Krystyna”)
of the AK-WiN unit led by Major Heronim Dekutowski (“Zapora”).
Despite being tortured for three weeks, she refused to budge
and was sentenced to 10 years in jail. According to an account
of her torture in Lublin,

This was a terrible night. She was beaten. She screamed….
Investigating officer Maksymiuk beat her with a wire-tipped
pole. He threw ‘Krysia’ over a chair, pulled
up her skirt, and whipped her. Then she was prostrated on
the floor and the torturers poured cold water into her nose.
She lost consciousness several times. ‘Will you talk?’ they
asked her when she opened her eyes. She kept silent. ‘Whip
her some more!’ Maksimiuk yelled. She was thrown back
into her cell at 7:00am. She was completely covered in blood….
The beating and torture did not help. ‘Krysia’ kept
completely silent.[69]

In September 1945 in Urzędów an UB expedition
caught Mrs. Gajewska, whose son served in the AK-WiN “Zapora” unit.
She was tortured in front of her other son, Stanisław,
who was 15-years old at the time. UB Captain Pokrzywa attempted
to force the boy to reveal the whereabouts of his brother: “Staś did
not answer. The scream of his mother, who was being beaten,
reverberated in his ears.”[70] The
same expedition captured at the time several AK-WiN insurgents.
They shot three, refused any medical help to two wounded guerrillas,
and beat their three colleagues with wooden sticks in front
of the villagers of Urzędów-Bęczyn who were
forcibly herded to witness the execution.[71]

In September 1945, to discourage support for the insurgents,
the UB men in Bielsk Podlaski beat a civilian suspect with
a board studded with nails. Then they sent his bloody shirt
to his wife as a warning, finally releasing her husband after
a while. Consequently, the man told the insurgents: “Gentlemen,
please do not stay at my farmstead! Forgive me! Or kill me!
I can’t stand being arrested again.”[72]

[36] See, e.g., cases
3710 and 3710/822, Special Archive of Lithuania, the Committee
for State Security (KGB), The Council of Ministers of the Soviet
Socialist Republic of Lithuania, in Chodakiewicz, Ejszyszki,
2: 49, 59, 62, 82, 94, 98, 114-22.[UP]

[38]
The accused in the trial were charged specifically pursuant
to article 1 paragraph 2 of the decree of August 31, 1944.
See Sentencja wyroku, Sprawa Bolesława Ramotowskiego i 21 innych, 16 and 17 May 1949,
Sąd Okręgowy w Łomży [afterward SOŁ],
file Ksu 33/49, 225. Because the pre-war penal code still applied
in Poland at the time, and it contained all of the appropriate
provisions to deal with a riot that resulted in murder (in
particular articles 23, 163, and 225 of the penal code, which
included death penalty), non-political laws could have been
used to prosecute the suspects in the Jedwabne case. See Juliusz
Makarewicz, Kodeks Karny z komentarzem (Lwów:
Wydawnictwo Zakładu Narodowego im. Ossolińskich,
1932); Kodeks Karny: Prawo o wykroczeniach (Warszawa:
Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Sprawiedliwości, 1939). [UP]

[46]
This propaganda ploy therefore required that the Communists
effusively play the role of the sole protectors of the Jewish
people. On April 17, 1949, the head of the proxy regime
in Warsaw, Bolesław
Bierut, cynically informed a visiting Jewish-American delegation
that “killing a Jew is ten times more of a crime than
ordinary killing” and vowed to punish severely anyone
responsible for crimes against the Jews. See Joseph Tenenbaum, In
Search of A Lost People: The Old and the New Poland (New
York: The Beechhurst Press, 1948), 227. Numerous other so-called “pro-Jewish” statements
were routinely made to that effect by the Communist officials
and the regime-controlled media. See also Simon Segal, “Eastern
Europe,” The American Jewish Yearbook, 5705,
vol. 46: September 18, 1944 to September
7, 1945, ed. by Harry Schneiderman (Philadelphia:
The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1944), 240-44; Raphael
Mahler, “Eastern Europe,” The American Jewish
Yearbook, 5706, vol. 47: 1945-46, ed. by Harry
Schneiderman and Julius B. Maller (Philadelphia: The Jewish
Publication Society of America, 1945), 391-408; Harry Schneiderman, “Eastern
Europe,” The American Jewish Yearbook, 5707,
vol. 48: 1946-47, ed. by Harry Scheiderman and Julius
B. Maller (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1946), 334-49; Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Żydzi
i Polacy, 1918-1955: Współistnienie, Zagłada,
Komunizm (Warszawa: Fronda, 2000), 535-38 [afterward Żydzi
i Polacy].[UP]

[48]
For example, in the sentencing statement we read not only
about “the
mass crime against the defenseless people who numbered 1,500” at
p. 229 of court records, but on p. 225 that the sentenced men
were “accused that on June 25 [sic July 10], 1941, in
Jedwabne aiding the authorities of the German state, they participated
in capturing about 1200 persons of Jewish nationality, who… were
burned en masse by the Germans in the barn.” See
Sentencja wyroku and Uzasadnienie, Sprawa Bolesława Ramotowskiego
i 21 innych, 16 and 17 May 1949, SOŁ, file Ksu 33/49,
225, 229. [UP]

[49] For a detailed
analysis see Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, The Massacre in Jedwabne,
July 10, 1941 : Before, During, After (
New York and Boulder, CO.: Columbia University Press and East
European Monographs, 2005) (forthcoming).[UP]

[50] This was a universal
phenomenon evident also in other cases. See Chodakiewicz, Ejszyszki,
2:15. [UP]

[55]
Torture by the NKVD started already during the first Soviet
occupation of Poland’s
Eastern Borderlands. See Jan T. Gross, Revolution from
Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine
and Western Belorussia, Expanded Edition ( Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 164-74. [UP]

[67]
Ryszard Młynarski eventually succeeded Suproniuk as the
head of the office. His case is controversial because his daughter,
Danuta Huebner nee Młynarska is Poland’s European
commissioner designated by the post-Communists. See Piotr Baran, “Ojciec
Danuty Huebner nie chce wracać do Ubeckiej przeszłości,” Super
Express, 27 October 2005. [UP]

[68]
Moczarski’s chief tormentors were: Colonel Anatol Fejgin,
Lieutenant Colonel Józef Dusza, Major Jerzy Kaskiewicz,
Captain Eugeniusz Chimczak, Captain Adam Adamuszek, Second
Lieutenant Tadeusz Szymański, Staff Sergeant Mazurkiewicz,
and Sergeant Stanisław Wardyński. Sentenced to death
in November 1952, Moczarski was held on death row for over
a year. Only in January 1955 did he learn that his sentence
had been commuted to life in October 1953. He was amnestied
in April 1956 and exonerated in December 1956. Moczarski recalled
his ordeal in a letter to his lawyer written at the time of
his “rehabilitation” trial. See Kazimierz Moczarski, Zapiski (Warszawa:
Państwowy Insytut Wydawniczy, 1990), 302-308. [UP]